Belgium

We Had A Good Run

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment

Well, we had a good run. It feels weird to say, but it’s finally election season again, and we’re in for a wild ride.

As Democrats (and Republican primary challengers?) clamber to win our hearts and minds, it really is hard to say which issues will dominate the election.  This administration has undermined American national security and divested from education. It has thrown tenuous progress on healthcare into disarray. It has effected self-defeating economic programs. It’s environmental policies are, just, wow. (Even Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act for chrissake.)

This administration has taken a humanitarian crisis and created a human rights atrocity. It has assailed a free press, the Constitution, and civil liberties at every turn – it’s worth mentioning that this extends far beyond the old leftist tropes of “human rights” and stuff: Donald Trump is on the record saying “take the guns first, go through due process second,” which is incredible, really. Somehow he is still endorsed by the NRA.

And so if you caught the brimming Democratic debates last week, it should not have surprised you to hear a lot of ideas on how to fix this stuff. We heard a few different takes on healthcare. We heard about our rapidly warming climate. We heard about campaign finance, and identity politics, and a Universal Basic Income to combat wealth inequality. This is all really important, but there is something missing from the Democratic field: foreign policy chops.

We’ve had a good run. Belgium, here we come!

In fact, the conversation was so focused on stinting damage domestically that we never looked abroad. The only mention, really, came from Marianne Williamson (who I’m pretty sure is only up there to sell books), when she rightly suggested that any humanitarian crisis on the southern border is a direct result of American foreign policy in Latin America over the last century.

In two years we’ve burned allies, insulted neighbors, praised journalist-murdering dictators, and torpedoed decades of hard-fought diplomacy. Career diplomats have left the State Department out of moral conviction. Right now a handbag designer is leading our efforts in the Korean Peninsula.

The damage done by this administration to American credibility abroad cannot be fixed in a single presidential term, even with a diplomatic genius at the helm, and we don’t have a diplomatic genius in the field. Best case scenario, we are probably looking at another decade of foreign policy floundering as the next administration struggles to right a disastrous four years at home and abroad. Maybe then we can begin to rebuild trust around the world that the United States will at least pretend to support democratic values and strong partnerships.

What this means, really, is that we’ve had a good run on top. We have now burned through all of our international goodwill (from defeating the Nazis, remember) by electing a Nazi sympathizer and allowing him to run this place into the ground. This administration is the beginning of the end of the United States’ global status as a diplomatic leader.

And, I mean, that’s a bummer. But it’s also probably not the end of the world. The Roman Empire fell, and Italy is fine, right? Like many colonial powers before us, it’s just our turn to step down now. Like Portugal. And Holland. And Belgium.

Like, Belgium had a good run, you know? They had their part in the rape and pillage of Africa and then kind of bowed out. As far as I can tell, Belgians now pretty much watch sports and smoke cigarettes and drink a lot of beer. Local beer, even. That place has, like, a lot of different beers. It’s great. And the UN is still based in Brussels – it’s not like it’s all over for them, the same way that New York will probably still be a global financial hub for the foreseeable future. People just won’t ask us for our opinions as much, you know?

And it’s kind of cool, in an historic way, to watch the fall of a great civilization. Can you imagine being there when Nero burned Rome? Now you can! So screw it. I’m going to go have a cigarette and a beer, I hear there’s a football game on.

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail


 

 

In Bruges

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
“You’re going to Belgium?” One of my more outspoken and discerning food critic friends asked with obvious distaste, “To do what, see how much mayonnaise you can eat?”I have to admit that I had similar reservations about the food. I had heard about the waffles, and the french fries, and I kept hearing about buffets that offer fifteen different kinds of mayo infusions. Honestly, I was sort of expecting the cuisine to be like  in England (another country that I have never visited but still feel strongly that they have horrible food). Fried everything, extra grease, slathered in mayonnaise, and served in a soggy paper cone. Yet the Belgian tourism office website declares in huge font straight away that this place is a “Foodie’s Delight,” that fine haute cuisine abounds with the quality of the French and the quantity of the German. Of course I understand that the Belgian tourism office website exists solely to get people to come spend money in Belgium, and that they’re likely to have a palpable bias, but I figured that if the food was really as bad as I imagined, that they might just not mention it. So I came in cautiously optimistic, with an open mind.

I come to tell you now that the cuisine of West Flanders is unbelievably good. In your face, haters.

Whether it’s braised rabbit in a rich and spicy bearnaise (with a heaping side of fries), mussels steamed in white wine and garlic (with a heaping side of fries), or a chicken, crusted in herbs and roasted to succulence (with a heaping side of fries), it’s all magnificent. It seems as though Belgian tourism got it right. It really is haute French cuisine, and plenty of it.

A nice dinner doesn’t really come cheap, though, it’s easy to spend $30-40 before even ordering a beer. So it’s a good thing that the street meat is just as good. A bratwurst is just a few Euro and those waffles we keep hearing about are even less.

I wish now that I’d taken a few photos of the food, but I just can’t quite get myself to pull the trigger on that in a restaurant. Maybe next time. I did get a snap of this $7 coffee in Bruges, though:

Worth it? Yes.

Straight up, WWI sucked.

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ 1 Comment
We’ve been tooling around the country near Roselare for a few days now. Really, ever since we got here. We’re getting around, now, to setting out from the womb of R&Breakfast for the cruel, cold, rainy, Belgian coast. I suppose if we had gone five days ago, we would have found sun and heat, but then, the Belgians are a people starved for sun and heat. If we had gone five days ago, then we also would have found crowds. Which terrify me. Even more terrifying than crowds are crowds of people speaking a language you don’t understand. And even more terrifying than that are crowds of people speaking a Germanic language that you don’t understand. If I thought that there might be crowds of people speaking a Slavic language that I don’t understand I simply wouldn’t go.

No, it’s much better that we find the beach wrapped in the damp embrace of misting rain and drear. I would otherwise find myself reduced to a quaking puddle of tears, self-loathing, and french fries.

These last few days in the Roeselare area have been a little bit of a blur. We made it back to Ieper/Ypres/Yjpr and Passchaendaele in a more timely fashion and made it into the museums which had locked the door in our faces before. We visited a couple of very small breweries, and a very large cookie factory. We rode bikes on some little roads and Tom really liked the light. We went to this rally race. Hollande was ridiculed by Europe and the NYT.

I’ve come to a couple of conclusions.

Belgium is, by many rights, the land of beer and chocolate (I haven’t been in to a chocolatier yet . . .), but beer selection in pubs is actually sort of limited. Beer production seems to be either at a national/international scale, or an incredibly local scale, without much in between. So when you go to a pub, you can get 3-4 of the national brands (think Budweiser, but more difficult to pronounce) and a handful of the local beers. But each bar has, pretty much, the same 8-10 beer selection. It’s not the orgy of innumerable tastes that I had anticipated. After a day or two you sort of find something that you like and roll with it.

This beer (available Sateside) warns us not to turn the bottle on its side or pour it into a juice glass.

We dropped in on the Saijsoenbrouwerij Vandewelle for a meeting with the brewer, a tour of the place, and a taste. Unreal. This is Chris Vandewalle:

Simply put, the man loves beer. And it shows. Even though Belgium is a mystical wonderland where beer is a cultural pillar and there is 1 brewery for each 6,500 people, they are susceptible to the same economic forces as the rest of the world. For decades the craft brewer struggled to compete with the scale of the national names (like Stella), but Chris explained to us that there has been a resurgence of awareness for small batch, locally made, seasonally available, organic, humanely raised and harvested, artisan beers in the last several years. Apparently there are hipsters everywhere, only in Belgium they seem to be doing some good.
Chris works four tens throughout the week so that he can afford to take Friday and spend fifteen hours brewing in his home operation. He only makes 4,000 liters a year for sale, “and more on weekends for myself, when I’m getting low.”

Chris shows off his grandfather’s recipe book

Also in Lo-Reninge we visited a giant cookie factory. All I can really remember from that is the anxiety that I felt when one of the cookies would sneak past all of the vacuum powered cookie sucker arms that moved the finished product from a conveyor belt. It makes me think that there’s a Finding Nemo-esque story in there somehwere . . .

Hang in there, little cookie. You are lost but not forgotten.
We also checked out the rally race on the way to the WWI museums. It’s big doings around here, and I couldn’t help but notice that many of the local drivers seemed . . . inspired. It also turns out that rally racing is way more exciting in a four minute clip on the internet than it is in person. We sort of just stood there with a group of Belgian rednecks (they exist) and listened to Adele on the iPhone in someone’s pocket. Every five or ten minutes a fancy and loud car would drive by real fast. Even though you could hear these cars coming from a mile away, and Tom and I were pretty sure that we could cross the street in less than ten minutes, and we promised not to sue if we got smoked by a rally car, the course marshal still made us go all the way around the finish.
Then we spent several hours in the Ieper and Passchaendaele WWI museums. 
WWI sucked.
So we’re off now to Bruges and the rainy coast.

Big Timers Only, Small Fries Need Not Inquire

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
Nico Mattan stood us up. But that’s a story for later.

After some breakfast, museuming, and a bit of high intensity napping, we made our way towards Izegem to check out the Izegem Koers pro race. The town has a bit of an American/Montana connection, it’s where the Euro Cross Camp is headquartered, and Tom has spent a lot of time there.

This area of Flanders is steeped in cycling heritage and rabid fanhood, and this race in particular has a long tradition of being a local holiday. We were told later that the factories in town close each year on the first Thursday in September so that no one can miss the event. I had heard tales of the drunken uproarious crowds, slinging accolades and jeers from behind riot barricades and bloodshot eyes; of old men, mothers, and children, worn bleary from beer, mayonnaise, and the exhaustion that comes from a whole day’s efforts seeped in partisan rage. I couldn’t wait to charge into that fray wielding sausage and beer, and immerse myself in Belgian cycling culture.

And yet our arrival set us upon a tepid corps of disinterested lookers on. At the finish line the riders came through to see one lap to go. The chaos and discord that I had so anticipated was in fact a viscous mass of thin lips and puckered faces. The race leader was alone off the front. He had earned five seconds and was resting his forearms on the tops of his handlebars, his face a picture of misery as he time trialed off the front before the tattered remains of a chase group which bore down behind him. It was an ideal of the glory and self flagellation that I think synonymous with the Flandrien, and yet they were met with silence. Muffled conversations continued without pause, a man sitting near me never looked up from his newspaper. As they came through the riders edged to the right side of the road to avoid the wispy plume of cigarette smoke that wafted from the beer garden and onto the course.

Hours later a fan explained to us that while, yes, the race is a local icon, perhaps 100 years old, it is still a local race. “Oh yes. The riders here are professionals, but they are very low level,” Glen explained when I asked him about the lackluster fans, “with the Vuelta going on now, all of the big riders are there.”

And there it was. These young men had born their flesh and their souls for the amusement of a crowd that wanted celebrity.

But to say that the fans were ungrateful would be misleading. They just didn’t seem particularly invested in the results of this race. The entire city was in the grips of a celebration of cycling. An extemporaneous carnival filled the marketplace. The only businesses that were open were the bars, and the recent bout of fine weather ensured that they were empty inside. Instead the streets were flooded with jubilant packs of friends and families.

The Wild Rockies Landscaping European Office was enlisted to assist with the pretty impressive infrastructure that they had in place for a Thursday afternoon race:

And during the podium presentation, as twenty or thirty people looked dumbly on, we were instructed to applaud by a pirate, and 1974 Eddy Merckx supervised.

TomRob sizes up the street meat situation in Izegem.

These are the three person outdoor urinals that were strewn about the city.

“No no, your shoes are definitely more ‘Euro’ than mine.”

And we made it to one of the scavenger hunt sites: De Pekker.

The revelry couldn’t last forever, and before it got dark we decided to go. We talked about looking for the Team USA development house in Izegem, we’d heard that it was damaged in a fire (accident or insurance fraud, it’s up to you to decide) and wanted to check it out. “The only thing about going to the house,” Tom pointed out, “is that I really don’t know where it is.” And so we rolled back towards Roeselare. Most of the 10k between the towns is along a paved bike path which parallels a shipping canal. At one point, though, at the outskirts of Roeselare is a bar with an artificial beach, which doubles for commuters as a cyclocross sand section.

Outside of the bar is a spa that advertises with its own UNIMOG:

Best spa ever?

In the end we made it back to R&Breakfast just after sunset. “A Belgian sunset,” Tom pondered, “I haven’t seen many of those. One year when I was in Belgium I only saw the sun twice.”

I’m mostly just glad that the finer parts of American culture are making it across the pond.

The Most Important Thing

~ TheGentlemanAtLarge ~ Leave a comment
One thing that I’ve never really gotten comfortable with is breakfast abroad. In the states, I don’t usually get all that fired up about it, a lot of days I just skip it. More often than not I’ll grab a little something at Le Petit for what amounts to a European breakfast anyway. But there’s just something about having the option of getting a three egg omelet, biscuits and gravy, a side of hash browns, and a bottomless vat of threadbare coffee that is comforting. These just aren’t things that are usually available in the countries that I’ve visited.

Belgium isn’t really much different in this regard, if we’re honest. It’s centered around bread and jams and chocolate, mostly, and at least where we’ve been the coffee is better than anticipated. Well, here’s what we’ve been having most days:

Candlelit dinners are one thing, but only at R&Breakfast are there candlelit breakfasts with a selection of sprinkles, either fruit or chocolate.
Rustic breads with local meats and cheeses. Lex described the baking culture in northern Europe as endangered. In Holland most of the bakeries are closed on weekends, especially on Sundays, and fresh bread can’t be had those days. The baker here is “a big man, with big hands, and he makes big breads,” Lex explained. “Sometimes people will come from France where the croissants are so delicate and tiny that you can barely see them. Then they will have his croissants and they cannot believe it. They are huge.” We haven’t come across these local croissants just yet, but we will be sure to take a crack at them when we do.

Each morning we find an assortment of both store bought and homemade marmalade, but the real decision making doesn’t come in until we look over the spreadable chocolates.

The table sags underneath a tray of fifteen different jars. Some of them are familiar, Nutella and Speculoos (smooth and crunchy), but most of them are not. There are national boutique spreads, the equivalent of JIF, and a number of simple glass jars with handwritten labels from just down the street in any direction. I’ve never been able to figure out why these chocolate spreads have never caught on in the States.
It’s been a pretty lazy day so far. Tom and I are recovering from the harrowing deliberations of yesterday’s foray into the Flanders countryside, and have felt much safer napping in Roeselare. We made it out to a cycling museum this morning, and couldn’t help but notice the candor of the high school smoking culture here. We rode past a school at lunch hour, and there were scores of young people sitting on the front steps hitting the cigs hard. It felt just like Spokane. We also saw a teenager in a shirt that read in large block letters, “Fuck Swag.” That was sort of refreshing.
It’s just a brief post, you’ll have to excuse me. We’re running off now to check out the Izegem Koers and have a beer with Nico Mattan. I trust that tomorrow’s update will have much more to say.